Slava nodded and fished out the pair of micro UAVs shaped like weird cyborg insects with pairs of rotating rotors and equipped with large camera eyes to gather imagery processed through facial recognition software. Each drone was no larger than Slava’s hand and programmed to automatically seek out and scan personnel, checking them against photographs and video of Dr. Helena Ragland. Tests conducted with soldiers wearing gas masks proved that the drones could still identify individuals based on their eye colors and shapes, along with their brow lines, with up to ninety-two percent accuracy. Should one of the Seekers spot Ragland, an alarm would flash in Lex’s HUD, along with the current GPS location and map overlay. The Seeker would lock on and not lose her. The plan was to release two drones on every level while en route to the basement.
“Okay, launching,” Slava reported, hurtling the devices into the air, where they automatically activated and flitted off. Between the Hummingbirds (now assuming overwatch positions atop the mountain), the Seekers here, and the larger UAV along with more Seekers controlled by Borya just outside, they had sizable backup of electronic eyes to feed them real-time data in one hell of a rapidly evolving battle space.
“Let’s go,” Lex ordered. He turned back for the stairwell door, noting that the biometric security system had been manually bypassed via emergency protocols as expected, hallelujah. He chanced a look back at the motor pool. It’d take the Spetsnaz Cockroaches and BTRs thirty minutes or more to punch a hole in that wall of debris. That was all the time he and Slava needed.
In fact, their handiwork might’ve just bought him a few extra minutes for a secondary mission, one he had not discussed with his men. He’d promised to abort that mission if it jeopardized their primary objective; however, the odds were now leaning in his favor.
“Hey, boss, the drone’s still on the pedestrian exit,” Borya told him. “I used the Seekers to scan every troop coming out on those carts. No matches so far.”
“Good man. I still think she’ll be dressed like them and wearing a mask. You spot anything suspicious or something the drone might’ve missed, you track ’em and don’t lose ’em.”
“Roger that.”
“Okay, we’re going down now and will definitely lose comm. I’ll be in touch when we get back up. Actual, out.”
THIRTY-TWO
Spetsnaz Headquarters
Fort Levski
Bulgaria
Either the elevators were not operating on reserve power or someone had manually shut them down, drawing a string of epithets from the Snow Maiden before she found one of two stairwell doors and practically threw herself inside.
She stood there for a second, wondering why the hell the door had opened so easily. She opened it again, peeked out, and saw that the security panel was shut down, suggesting that every security door had been opened inside as part of the HQ’s evacuation plan. She ducked back. Took a few breaths. Composed herself. Okay, move . . .
She glanced up at a stairwell that seemed to rise for kilometers, with several of the backup lights flashing on the landings, their electronics rattled by the quakes. She pounded her way up the macabre conduit, her boots echoing, heart racing, breath heavy through her mask. She hated wearing the thing and how it cut off her peripheral vision, but she wouldn’t dare sample the air. It might take hours for the contaminant to clear.
Movement above. Heavy footfalls. She froze, hit the wall, and just listened. Shouts, something about locking down and securing the ordnance, an evacuation plan not coming together, and then the pounding on steps. Silence. She remembered to breathe and kept on, arriving at a door marked in Cyrillic as LEVEL 6 ARMORY AND REPAIR.
Before she could mount the next step, the door slammed open behind her, and she came face-to-face, or, rather, mask-to-mask, with a bald, bug-eyed lieutenant leveling his pistol on her chest. He noted the uniform and frowned.
“Hey, what’re you doing here?” he asked.
Reflexively, she ducked, leaned forward, and shot him in the groin. As he reared back, she drove back his gun and put a bullet in his head. She was back on the stairs before he hit the ground.
What am I doing here? she thought. Well, that’s an interesting question. I was going to have dinner with the president, but he’ll have to take a rain check.
Another shuffling of feet sent her ducking to the wall. Shit, she’d never escape at this rate. She leaned out and stared up, spotting a few of the lab techs and doctors in blue scrubs rushing up the stairs. She charged after them, using their commotion to disguise her own ascent, and when she arrived on that landing, LEVEL 5 HOUSING AND HOSPITAL, she stared slack-jawed at the piles of men and women lying there, perhaps twenty in all. She leaned over and checked for one man’s pulse. Weak, thready, but still there. Clever bastards, this attacking force. They were using a gas like Kolokol-7. She’d seen that agent’s effects.
Literally stepping on the unconscious personnel, she reached the stairs, and with a renewed shudder of urgency, she kept on. Just climbing, climbing, the stairwell endless now, her thoughts drifting to the Euros, the Americans, the Forgotten Army, wondering if any of them were responsible for the attack. Were the Ganjin involved? Hell, she’d worry about that later. The point was, everyone wanted out, and she’d ride the wave.
But damn, knowing whom she might find outside was important, as in lifesaving important. This attack seemed expertly timed, and maybe Osin was working for someone else, the Americans or even the Ganjin.
Or maybe that miracle she’d been asking for had simply come through, and this attack had absolutely nothing to do with her and was part of a strategic plan put forward by the motherland’s enemies—
And the motherland was not short on enemies. Osin had simply been acting on the president’s behalf to rescue her so that she could be interrogated, tortured, and murdered at a later and more convenient date.
Ah, it was all supposition. All bullshit. She shook her head in frustration and fought for more breath. What was the next level? Research and development. Geek central, they called it, where the Russian special ops nerds perfected their gadgets, gizmos, poisons, and explosives. She gasped and climbed harder, her quads warming in protest. As she pounded across the next landing, the booming of at least two pairs of boots on the stairs overhead stole the rest of her breath and sent her to the door, tugging it open, and rushing inside.
She willed herself into a statue, her breath turning shallow. The hall ahead was cast in a crimson glow and spilled out toward the laboratory stations positioned along the curving back wall. She’d visited this level only once or twice before, but she remembered marveling over the length, breadth, and numbers of experiments and complexity of the research being conducted here—everything from nanotechnology across a number of disciplines to limb replacements to the more traditional forms of weapons development best suited for the special forces operator. Chairs lay askew from their stations, terminal screens flashing in their locked-out modes, suggesting the teams had time to escape before the gas reached this level.
She tensed as movement came from just outside the door—and then, abruptly, the door swung open, she remaining just behind it as a burly Spetsnaz officer wearing a gas mask hung his head inside, then pulled from his pocket something that flashed as he tossed it into the air. Two flashes.
He shut the door and left.
She took her breath, waiting.
Something hummed nearby, and then, in the next breath, a micro UAV hovered not a meter from her face, a tiny red light flashing below its twin cameras.
She frowned and whispered, “Hello.” Then she reached up and tried to swat it, but the drone buzzed away.
* * *
Instead of engaging the doctor and techs coming up the stairwell toward them, Lex and Slava had managed to duck inside the entranceway to the intelligence and signals division, waiting near the door as those men passed. Unsurprisingly, the stations behind them were empty, pr
obably the first ones to be vacated at the sound of an alarm. Most intel and signals personnel had no taste for things that went boom and disrupted their trancelike stares as they reviewed data streams piped in from around the world. Didn’t matter what country they came from or whose side they were on.
Lex and Slava deployed the next pair of Seekers, then moved out, reaching level five, and repeated the process. Slava reported no movement from inside the R & D level, although one of the Seekers did pick up a target that failed to match Ragland; that officer’s ID was still being processed.
With an ironic grin, Lex mused that the rescue could become far easier than they had anticipated. When the evacuation orders were given here, there was the outside chance that the prisoner would be left in her cell to succumb to the gas, only to be accounted for later. That was the path of least resistance for administrators—an unlikely one to be sure, but stranger things had happened to Lex in his long and turbulent career. Bottom line: He and Slava needed to clear the entire interrogation level. Ragland was either still there or being moved to the surface, where Lex’s teammates would be waiting for her.
Even more determined now, they double-timed their way down the stairs, releasing drones on levels five and six, then gasping as they reached the confinement and interrogation level. They slammed through the door, rifles at the ready—
“Wow, boss, look at this guy,” Slava cried, rushing up to a white-haired man who could have been mistaken for an albino. He was lying supine in his skivvies. “Someone had a bad night.”
Lex crouched down and checked the officer for a carotid pulse, noticing the red marks across the man’s neck. “You’re right, he’s dead. Looks like he was strangled, shit.”
“Check these guys. Weapons gone. Somebody shot ’em up.”
His mouth falling open, Lex gaped at the wounds on each of the guards.
“And what’re these?” asked Slava, holding up a set of steel shackles, real old-school Russian restraints that were far more cumbersome than the more modern zipper cuffs they employed. The keys were still hanging from the heavy wrist cuffs. “Whoa, look at that,” Slava added, pointing to the orange prisoner’s uniform lying in a pile beside the desk.
A sharp pang struck Lex’s gut. Intel had indicated that Ragland was, at the moment, the only prisoner being held at the HQ. “I don’t believe this,” he gasped. “It’s like somebody else broke her out.”
Slava’s eyes seemed magnified behind his mask. “Boss, are you serious? Who’d want her?”
“I don’t know, maybe this Ganjin group. Who the hell knows!” Lex’s pulse leapt forward as he rose. “Put those chains in your pack. They might be good for DNA later if this all goes south. Drones up! We’ve still got ten cells and four chambers to clear, and we ain’t leaving till we’re sure.”
Lex stuffed the prison uniform in his own pack, and then they split up and shifted down the curving hall, continuing their sweep, clearing each cell, one by one, right and left, the drones flitting off behind them. Every time Slava called, “Clear,” Lex’s heart sank a little further.
His aim grew shaky as the enormity of the mission and the thought of failure took hold. He cleared the next few rooms. Empty, empty, empty.
“Hey, check it out!” Slava cried, bounding ahead, skipping the next two doors and steering his big frame straight for two more bodies lying just outside the farthest cell door.
As Lex jogged up behind Slava, the blood puddles and gaping wounds were unmistakable.
“This had to be her cell,” said Slava, pushing open the door. “Right here.”
Lex stiffened and spoke through his teeth. “Bad timing . . . bad intel . . . just what the hell is this?” His mind leapt forward in a panic, and he got on the radio, forgetting that the signal wouldn’t get through. “Borya, it’s me. We’re finishing up down here. Looks like someone else got to her first. I need your eyes now, buddy.”
“Can’t . . . hear . . . you, boss. Signal breaking . . .”
Lex cursed. “I’ll try again when we get up top!”
“Say again?”
“Just stay sharp!”
“All this for nothing?” Slava asked.
Lex fought against the nerves. This wasn’t him. He was a seasoned operator, for God’s sake. Marine Corps Raider. When they needed a hunter, they called him because he never let a situation overwhelm him. No fog of war. Only clarity, looking at it . . . seeing what must be done. He took a deep breath and spoke evenly:
“Sergeant, you think we’d launch an attack like this without a secondary objective? We’re using Ragland’s kidnapping as an excuse to our allies to blow the shit out of this place. We’ve known about this HQ for the past year, and the general’s been arguing about taking it out, along with the rest of Fort Levski. The politicians have been dancing around it because they feared the reprisal.”
“So we’re still cool?”
“No, we’re not cool. And we’re not leaving here without our package. She’s gotta be on her way up top right now. Let’s go get her.”
* * *
The Snow Maiden stood near the door leading out into the motor pool. Her face was covered in sweat, the mask beginning to fog up as she slowly peered outside.
She did a double take.
Two Cockroach drivers were trying to blow through a mountain of rubble rising nearly five meters, while behind them a dozen or more vehicles were on fire and waves of black smoke hung like smog over the entire cave.
She spotted the pedestrian door to the left of those big IFVs. Ten or twelve more troops were rushing though it. She picked her path behind a row of BTRs, a few of them with smoke pouring from their gunners’ stations, then darted off, unsure if anyone had seen her.
Grimacing, she reached the rear of the nearest carrier and stooped behind the heavy metal plating.
A shadow passed over her.
She glanced back at a troop holding his rifle on her. His gaze narrowed behind his mask. “Wait, you’re not . . . wait . . .”
She put a finger to her lips.
“I have one here!” he cried. “Here!”
His gaze had left her for just a second, searching for his comrades.
She went for his mask and rifle at the same time, knocking the gun up with her right forearm, while driving the barrel of her left pistol beneath his chinstrap. The mask came free at the same time she fired.
The gunshot was like the starting pistol of an Olympic sprint, and she stole only a few seconds to seize the troop’s rifle, abandon one of her pistols, stow the other, then rocket along the back of the APCs. Sometime during all of that, the troop fell back and died.
Now, two more troops were rounding the corner of the last carrier in the row, having responded to the first man’s cries—
And the Snow Maiden used her forward momentum to leap nearly a meter into the air, leaving them all of a second to react.
They were lifting their rifles toward her, but she’d already opened fire, leveling both men as she hit the ground, slipped, and fell flat on her chest, the rifle sliding sideways, the wind blasting from her lungs.
A fire woke in her knee.
She lay there, not believing that she’d actually fallen. Her internal voice screamed for her to get up. With aching eyes she slowly rose, tugged up the rifle, and started off once more, limping over the spiking pain. Damn it, she’d jumped like that a thousand times. So much for the acrobatics of youth. She’d best rely on age and treachery now.
Gunfire ricocheted off the next row of Cockroaches as she darted from one to the next, closing in on the exit. If she fell again, they’d have her.
One troop barked for his comrade to close the door, and the Snow Maiden stopped, rolled back, and shot him three times in the chest for his efforts. She lowered her rifle and shivered, and the mask suddenly felt as though it were slipping off. Growing paranoid, she shoved it much ha
rder into her face.
Don’t stop now, she reminded herself. With a groan, she was back on the move, weaving between the parked Cockroaches, an apparition as immaterial as the shadows between the towering 7.62-millimeter machine guns, shoulders rubbing along the armor plates, closer now, the door only fifty meters away.
Two troops charged toward that door, more like a hatch with big horizontal and perpendicular handles, just as the last of another group filed through. They shut the door and rolled back, bringing their rifles to bear, shifting their aim across the motor pool to scan the area in her direction.
Something buzzed past her shoulder and she stopped, craned her neck, spotted another of those micro UAVs flying by. The drone streaked past her and toward the guards, zeroing in on them, as though getting a bead on their faces.
She frowned. No, those little buggers didn’t belong to the Spetsnaz, as evidenced by their reaction:
Both troops opened fire on the UAV, and the Snow Maiden tore free from the shadows and raced straight for them, exploiting the diversion to strike one in the upper shoulder, the other in the neck, pounding them into the ground. They were stunned, still moving, so as she neared them, she finished the job as one tried to roll over, while the other struggled to raise his rifle.
More shouts lifted behind her. Entirely out of breath, she swung open the heavy industrial hatch—
Just as dozens of superheated rounds pinged and sparked and ricocheted off its surface. She screamed against the fire and slammed shut the hatch behind her.
No way to lock it. The security system bypassed. Nothing else to do but run—
Half a kilometer in the dim red light.
The long tunnel seemed even more vast, the strings of lights swirling into a kaleidoscope on her periphery as she picked up the pace.